See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in _Mind_, April, 1899.
See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” _American Journal of Psychology_, May-October, 1901.
We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s _Social Psychology_, even though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.
See W. R. Scott, _Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy_. (1900.)
It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book on _The Art of Life_, designed to show that just as the sculptor works with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”
“They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W. Benn (_The Greek Philosophers_, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, 1918.
This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (_La Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs_, p. 340), “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone, avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their existence.”